Contributor Jarvis

Ubuntu needs better artwork. Everybody know Fedora and Opensuse look better than ubuntu.
I'm not trying to say that the look is more important than the OS or the current theme is ugly but lets be honest the look is the first impression.

I appreciate the current efforts from ubuntu, but with this level of art I don't think "Ubuntu will surpass Apple in two years" as what Mark Shuttleworth said. I know there are a lot of buzz around deviantart this days, and I hope it makes some changes in intrepid, but with my full respect for the community contribution with the OS; ubuntu should have an artwork team which can be creative and handle this work correctly.

As I can see in:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=pidgin
Intrepid has been already updated with Pidgin 2.5.0, but Hardy has not.

Ubuntu Hardy is going to be used and NOT upgraded to Intrepid by a lot of users because it has LTS, and it's a lot better and newbie-friendly than Dapper (also LTS).

So Ubuntu devs should stay in touch with the most used programs and update then in Hardy's repositories as soon as possible. Not in Backports, but in the official repositories.

Like Pidgin, that has a lot of new improvements in MSN Protocol and other stuff:
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ChangeLog

Some new releases most times don't increase a lot of things, but some do. Like aMule 2.2.2 (2.2.0 SVN in repo), emesene 1.0.1 (1.0 in repo), aMSN 0.97.2 (0.97 in repo) and Transmission 1.33 (1.06 in repo).

I know that devs have to do a lot of tests to check stability, but hey, I downloaded Pidgin 2.5 from getdeb.net and everything is working like a charm.

So please, update Pidgin to 2.5 in official repositories (and other popular programs too)!

:)

EDIT: sorry for writing "pigdin" instead of "pidgin" on title :(

To create a moving desktop background in Ubuntu (Like in Vista).

I came across this thread while looking around about another problem:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sound-juicer/+question/2046

The pertinent quote:
I tried to follow your directions. After I entered the command in
terminal mode and pressed enter it kept asking for my password. It
would not let me enter it though. I typed it several times but nothing
appeared on the screen.

Richard

Emesene is now on its stable version 1.0 and is and awesome IM. It's Pidgin with aMsn's features.

This may sound crazy, but I think would be very usefull and would show the power and flexibility of Linux...

1. There are deeply invasive performance/scalability/latency fixes for CFS regressions (vs. 2.6.24) in the 2.6.25 tree. These fixes are too invasive to be ported to the 2.6.24 kernel without significant risk.

2. Many of the driver updates/new drivers in the kernel-ubuntu package are merged into upstream as of 2.6.25. (This is always true, but the smaller the delta against upstream the better on release day).

3. Fedora 9 is based on 2.6.25 which means that key RH kernel developers are aggressively working to get the feature and performance/scalability regressions vs. 2.6.18 & 22 fixed.

4. The kgdb patch will probably be merged at the start of the 2.6.26 cycle which means the delta vs. 2.6.25 kernel should be pretty manageable. This would be really valuable from an LTS ongoing perspective.

5. The RT patch will be better maintained (and smaller) against 2.6.25. (see #3)

6. Better virtualization and SELinux support (see #3).

Given the life-cycle of an LTS release (especially this one which will finally have a meaningful chance to enter the data center) these considerations are especially important.

Obviously 2.6.25 would have to be in addition to 2.6.24 for the Hardy 8.04 LTS release time-frame, but it does allow the aforementioned benefits to be propagated forward.

Have an option in appearance for xp-vista like look i.e. start menu, blue or black glass look, one bar, quick launch, notify area, and a control panel.

I tried several versions of linux software and they all screamed that it did the same as windows.
I stopped using them for one very important reason: they all worked in there conservative non-tolerant linux way.
The day it works like windows I will use it.
-I want to install programs like windows
-I want tot use the filemanager like windows
-I want program names with normal names and not cryptic linuxnames only meant for linux insiders.
-I want the windows-like interface and all the things I usually do with windows.

Every windows user wants to work like he or she did with windows.
If Ubuntu does this, all these people will go and work with Ubuntu
Until then : nada
I just don't understand why nobody in the Linux world does see this what every windows user knows.
To me it feels that nobody in linux world wants to see this fact.
Very very strange.
Make it like windows and everyone will adopt Ubuntu

Today most of the computers are providing 2Go of RAM or more. When I'm looking at the memory consumption of ubuntu it is about 400Mo.

I think that Ubuntu should look at the RAM capacity of the computer and take the full advantage of the hudge amount of memory that we have today.

I'm sure it will be possible to preload most usefull apps and to bring a more efficient, smooth and fast system.

Make a kickass chess game with nice graphics like Chess Titans on Windows Vista.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_Titans

In "Appearance", you can click on the "Customize..." button.

There in the "Controls" tab you can select "Redmond".
But in "Window Border" there is no "Redmond" setting. :(

I propose to add a "Redmond" Window Border, to go along with the "Redmond" Controls.

Add more effects to Cheese, the GNOME webcam application.

I suggest a "backdrop effect", so you appear to be somewhere you're not;
* In space
* Under water
* Up in the skies
* In a car
* On a beach
* In jail (behind steel bars)
* Map (so you can pretend to be a weather reporter, or military invasion planner)
* Desert

I also suggest a "radioactive effect" which makes you appear radioactive, you glow with a green tint.

Other effects;
* Black/white (monochrome)
* Old movie style (black/white + slight yellow tint + film-grain/image-noise)
* Interpolation effects (such as cel-shading)
* Blur

Make Ubuntu shutdown faster.

Does it really need todo all the stuff it does?
Cant it just seal the file system and shutdown.

Apple have designed macintosh hardware in a way that it is trivial to access data on another mac, as if it were an external Harddisk. So the computer doesn't need to be opened, and you can install programs directly onto it without network protocols.

Apple's method of doing it is:
1) Turn on the computer you want to treat like an external harddisk and hold down T on the keyboard.
2) Plug in a normal 6-pin firewire cable between both Mac's.
3) All mounted devices (USB memory sticks, inserted CD's and HDD's) will appear on the other computer, as if the computer was a external drive.
4) You may boot off the external drives as if they were internal, and use them as normal.

Some potential uses of this technology are:
1) Easier to service the computer. If the software is dodgy, you can easily determine this because the computers data will still appear on the other computer. This means that you can also copy data off even if it wont boot.
2) Boot off a remote computer. If the video card is faulty on a computer, you can simply put it into target disk mode, start up the other computer, and it will be as if you were on the other computer.
3) Easy migration of data. Many computer manufacturers such as IBM's or Dell's will not allow you to open a computer within the warranty period, so it is not easy to migrate the data over. You cannot just take the harddisk out and put it in the new computer. With this, since the computer can be made to appear as if it were an external Harddisk, it is effortless to program something to migrate the data over.

One problem however is that Apple implements this via EFI or Open firmware. While many PC's are now getting EFI support, its not that common.

One method we could use to deal with the lack of EFI, is to simply include a modified kernel which instead of mounting the directories, etc, acted as a block device over firewire/ATA over ethernet so that the harddisks would appear on the other computer. Loading the kernel would be done via grub on LiveCD (so the harddisk is not in use)

[....]

We should investigate new types of screensavers which are network based instead of the old traditional single-computer screensavers. Probably the oldest example in the book is a network wide fish tank. Fishes swim to other computers, and the longer a computer remains idle, the larger its fish becomes. Fishes evolve into swarms, etc. If you want to go spore like, it could be that computers that idle longer, evolve into more refined communities which fight others. For the more G rated crowd, why not turn it into a computer lab full of "poker" player PC's. Or, even better, why not have a whole lab full of computers playing Doom. The faster the CPU, the better the computer performs in game.

Even old screensavers composed of bouncing cows or flying toasters, while nice, could be nicer if they were distributed in some form. Not great for a lab performing CPU clustering, but just makes things more polished overall, and shows ubuntu off as a OS for networking.

Lame I know, but still, its something which nobody else has done for anything other then scientific processing like folding at home. In a graphics lab though, it may be hard to convince them to burn CPU cycles on protein folding. But nobody minds watching computers take on a mind of their own

Never seen this on Windows or OSX. We would be ahead on this one. And it would make people actually want to leave their computer idling.

Special security precautions would be neccessary though, you would want a means of running the screensavers with barely any permissions.

A link in the menus of various apps should be added, to easily link people to Ubuntu brainstorm. Apple scatters feedback buttons all over their apps, we dont want that, but we do want to make it easier for people with a sudden brainwave whilst using a program, to easily be able to send their idea.

They must be presented with a list of similar ideas first though (or there will be many dupes).

Amsn is better, it looks good and everybody that a know use it. In my opinion amsn must replace pidgin as a default Instant Messaging client

Although there are great alternatives to Microsoft Office such as Open Office, sometimes when viewing/editing documents between the two programs, the formatting and other small details do not match exactly.

When I am working with someone who only uses only Microsoft Office, I want to be sure that we are looking at EXACTLY the same document. MS Office is very widely used, and therefore I think that 100% compatibility between MS Office and some word processor (or wine) on Ubuntu is important.

For those of us without ready access to the internet (yes, there are still some of us left!), and in an effort to avoid the countless how-to forum posts, most being slightly different to each other - why not include the NVidia and ATI/AMD proprietary drivers with each release?

95% of users (if not more) will immediately install these drivers, as the open source drivers suck for anything but the most basic use. The moment you try and play GLTron or Crack-Attack! the open source driver issues will be apparent.

As far as I know, Ubuntu and its derivatives do not proclaim to be 100% open source, and for the sake of ease of use, I think it would be a good idea to include these 2 drivers.